Highlights—October 3, 2015

“Not the same company as when hired”

Former Employee — Applications Developer in Atlanta, GA. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros:

Much freedom in how you work; not micro-managed.

Telecommuting has some benefits.

Cons:

Management cared more about utilization (number of hours worked) than what is actually produced. No benefit to being efficient and hard working.

Management cares more about hourly rate of employees and thinks everyone is easily replaceable with cheap offshore labor.

Advice to Management: Need to understand that cheaper is not always better. Laying off top performer Americans and keeping low performing offshore employees may be the downfall of the company one day.

“Financial Analyst-Stay Away, Not Worth The Headache”

Former Employee — Financial Analyst in Winston-Salem, NC. I worked at IBM full-time (less than a year).

Pros: The only pros that I can think of is that I get a paycheck on a weekly basis and that my co-workers are a great group of people.

Cons: As a financial analyst, it's horrible! The account managers don't work with you in order for you to successfully do your job and certain managers act as if you're bothering them when you have a question. You're constantly sitting on items because account managers don't do their jobs as selling is their main task! What happened to teamwork makes the dream work? This place is a nightmare!

Advice to Management: Some management needs to go. The turnover is high and I guarantee that part of the reason is due to management. You've had numerous employees walk off of the job with more to come. Take heed! Employees complain amongst one another and feel like their concerns fall upon deaf ears.

“Consultant — Consulting by Degrees”

Current Employee — Consultant in New York, NY. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than a year). Pros: Great exposure to the enterprise marketplace, meritocratic, easy to shine if you are highly motivated. Cons: Inefficiencies of working at an enormous company, complacency, extremely hierarchical. Advice to Management: Get rid of the glass ceiling. You have many talented young people leaving the company because you do not take care of them. The "everyone is replaceable" rule doesn't work in your favor if everyone who is talented leaves.

“Opportunities out of reach”

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Variety of technology...there is probably someone somewhere working on anything you are interested in. 100 years of adapting to changing markets has created a strong business side of the house. Cons: Vast organization with endless layers of hierarchy. Difficult to understand the connection between product development and the market; possibly, there is no relationship at all...really. Advice to Management: Quit encouraging engineering teams to "market" their wares. This leads to bad engineering. Basically, people start to lie about things that should be grounded in facts, such as reliability of systems.

“In terminal decline”

Former Employee — Technical Support Specialist in Winchester, England (UK). I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: It used to be a good place to work. There are still some good people remaining but morale is desperately low. Cons: The EPS obsession is the cause of countless redundancies and every year there are more. Is there anyone left? Advice to Management: Beyond help

“Good place, good people”

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. Pros: Great place to work. HR understanding. The streets outside the office were clean; the garbage tidied away. Cons: I don't think there's anything bad to say here. I was allowed to keep my cat at my desk under my feet. Advice to Management: My advice to management would be to clean the closets every once in a while. But I was treated respectfully by all.

“Sales Rep”

Former Employee — Sales in Littleton, MA. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 3 years). Pros: Big company, lots of opportunity to gain experience in a wide range of business practices. Cons: Poor leadership, slow to adapt to market, virtually impossible to be paid your On-Target Earnings despite job performance, disconnected, tone deaf leadership. Cookie cutter, one size fits all approach to nearly everything which causes missed opportunities for IBM in a competitive market. Advice to Management: Split this company up into smaller groups and have a CEO of each group that runs their own business and allows each group to be nimble in their niche. IBM CEO works to ensure these groups work together.

New York Times:

Toys ‘R’ Us Brings Temporary Foreign Workers to U.S. to Move Jobs Overseas. By Julia Preston. Excerpts: When Congress designed temporary work visa programs, the idea was to bring in foreigners with specialized, hard-to-find skills who would help American companies grow, creating jobs to expand the economy. Now, though, some companies are bringing in workers on those visas to help move jobs out of the country.

For four weeks this spring, a young woman from India on a temporary visa sat elbow to elbow with an American accountant in a snug cubicle at the headquarters of Toys “R” Us here. The woman, an employee of a giant outsourcing company in India hired by Toys “R” Us, studied and recorded the accountant’s every keystroke, taking screen shots of her computer and detailed notes on how she issued payments for toys sold in the company’s megastores.

“She just pulled up a chair in front of my computer,” said the accountant, 49, who had worked for the company for more than 15 years. “She shadowed me everywhere, even to the ladies’ room.”

By late June, eight workers from the outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS, had produced intricate manuals for the jobs of 67 people, mainly in accounting. They then returned to India to train TCS workers to take over and perform those jobs there. The Toys “R” Us employees in New Jersey, many of whom had been at the company more than a decade, were laid off.

A temporary visa program known as H-1B allows American employers to hire foreign professionals with college degrees and “highly specialized knowledge,” mainly in science and technology, to meet their needs for particular skills. Employers, according to the federal guidelines, must sign a declaration that the foreign workers “will not adversely affect the working conditions” of Americans or lower their wages. ...

In most cases when American workers lost jobs, the positions have been in technology, with employers arguing there are shortages of Americans with the most advanced skills. But in recent years, many jobs that American workers lost have been in accounting and back-office administration — although there is no shortage of Americans qualified to do that kind of work. ...

Those companies also use another temporary visa, the L-1B, which has no annual cap and allows businesses to internally transfer their employees who have “advanced knowledge” from branches in other countries to offices in the United States. A spokesman for TCS, Benjamin Trounson, said it maintained “rigorous internal controls to ensure we are fully compliant with all regulatory requirements.” ...

Many tech workers facing layoffs are older, with years at the insurer. They were galled by executives’ statements that they were less qualified to learn the new systems than the foreign workers replacing them. “There are a lot of new technologies coming in all the time,” said an applications engineer in New York, who is 58 with 18 years at the company. “There is no reason at all we can’t do training for that.”

There are at least seven IT workers at Disney who are pursuing, or plan to pursue, federal and state discrimination administrative complaints over their layoffs. Another Disney worker, still employed by the firm, has filed a state administrative discrimination complaint in California. These complaints are a first step to litigation.

Separately, there are ongoing court cases alleging discrimination against two of the largest India-based IT services firms, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. The federal judges in each of cases have given a green light for the plaintiffs to proceed after rejecting dismissal efforts. ...

What's being challenged, in sum, is the job replacement system created by the H-1B program. U.S. IT workers, as a condition for their severance, are being made to train H-1B visa-holding contractor replacements to take over their jobs.

The contractors often work for IT services firms that employ large numbers of H-1B workers. Most of these workers are from India and regional countries. This practice of replacing U.S. workers with foreign workers constitutes national origin discrimination, say its critics.

The court case against Tata, whose plaintiffs include a former SCE employee, alleges that some 95% of its employees are South Asian or mostly Indian. Tata has called the allegations baseless.

New on the Alliance@IBM Site

http://www.endicottalliance.org/thedisintegrationofemploymentinIBM.htm To all Alliance supporters, send and share the above link to the article "The disintegration of employment in IBM" far and wide. Put it on your FaceBook page; send it to newspapers; send it with comments to your political reps and send it to your co-workers. Help break the secrecy of IBM job cuts.
Put some pressure on IBM. -Alliance-

Comment 09/29/15:

Job Title: SA; Customer Account: Richmond. Message: Re: Project Yukon. If December is the net big RA you can bet it will be before the date where they have to make good on the 401(k) match. I feel like IBM Services is setting up to be sold to a competitor. They are shaking trees but not many resources left to fall. So sad that a big strong American company has degraded to such a pitiful level. Driven by corporate greed, it is doomed. Hope all do well outside of IBM. You will feel better once its over. -RA'd-

http://www.endicottalliance.org/thedisintegrationofemploymentinIBM.htmTo all Alliance supporters: Send and share the above link to the article "The disintegration of employment in IBM" far and wide. Put it on your FaceBook page; send it to newspapers; send it with comments to your political reps and send it to your co-workers. Help break the secrecy of IBM job cuts. Put some pressure on IBM. -Alliance-

If you hire good people and treat them well, they will try to do a good job.
They will stimulate one another by their vigor and example.
They will set a fast pace for themselves.
Then if they are well led and occasionally inspired, if they understand what the company is trying to do and know they will
share in its sucess, they will contribute in a major way.
The customer will get the superior service he is looking for. The result is profit to customers, employees, and to stcckholders.
—Thomas J. Watson, Jr., from A
Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM.

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